A bit of a niche topic but am wondering if anyone has suggestions. We have a fairly small architectural design and visualization company that is growing a bit this year and I'm looking for the best tech solution.

Currently we have a handful of people who are basically using their computer of choice for Sketchup, Revit and V-Ray. However, we are going to need to add a few more people and I'm looking for the most cost effective (and efficient) way to allow everyone to work on their models on their computers but also have a way to access some additional "computer power" when they have a highly complex or large model and particularly when they need to render a complex view.

Most of our rendering work is currently performed by 2 people and they are using MacBook Pros (I believe the i9 processor, 64GB RAM, not sure which graphics card but I know it has 8GB of memory, and SSD storage.) Some renders can take over an hour on this computer (others only a few seconds, but it's really inefficient when we need to produce several renderings from a complex model and it basically ties up his computer all day)

Switching to a desktop is a non-starter because one person in particular is working and traveling routinely. I also really don't want to have to buy a desktop and laptop for every person. And I also don't want to buy 2 laptops for each person to use the other if one is stuck rendering all day.

Is there a solution where we could buy a super powerful workstation (like the ThinkStation P920 with multiple processors, tons of ram and multiple graphics cards) and offload the heavy lifting rendering work to that? I've read that Remote Desktop and virtual machine instances don't tend to work well with programs that need heavy graphics card use and don't really want to spend $15k on a super computer just to test it out!

Does anyone have experience with something like this?

They aren't remoting in to play games at 120 frames per second so graphics performance isn't an issue.

Another option is cloud based virtual machines. Not sure on the performance but a subscription service like Azure might be cheaper then buying a massive workstation.

I think you're thinking like a small company. If you're truly growing, you need to go ahead and spend the money on the resources you need. That will allow you to save time which will allow you to make more money in the long run, and the money spent on equipment won't mean as much.

Don't spend a lot of time trying to save money when you can spend money saving time, which will make you more money in the long run. It sounds like that's exactly what's at play here. As far as specifics, the new M1 Macs should be better than the Intel ones at this sort of thing and you can always get a Mac Mini for the desktop and a MBP for the guys that need to go remote. Later, when they come out, you can get a couple of higher performing iMacs or a new Mac Pro, if necessary.

Maybe some of the more graphics intensive AWS Workspaces might be an option:

https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/pricing/

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/10/run-high-performance-graphics-workstations-in-the-cloud-with-new/

Awesome that looks a lot like what I need!

It's not so much about the money but the hassle of people potentially having to lug around 2 laptops (and really it doesn't seem there is a laptop available with the processor and graphics card specs to handle highly complex renders in a reasonable amount of time for any price.)

This looks like it wouldn't tie them to a physical location with a workstation which is what I'm trying to accomplish.

Yeah, you basically need a single compute render farm at your disposal to use (or be billed) as needed.

You could purchase a small number of dedicated render workstations that stay at the office, and use a renderfarm manager (like AWS Deadline, https://www.awsthinkbox.com/deadline ) to handle the job queuing. Basically, people would work on their laptops, and then submit the long render jobs to the renderfarm so the farm would do the work while they can continue using their laptops for something else. The renderfarm management software scales with your farm, so you could start out with a small number of machine to handle the rendering and scale it up as needed.

Assuming you already have VPN access setup, the job submission could also be performed remotely. All they would need to bring home is their laptop, assuming it is powerful enough to setup the scenes in the first place.

Would love to see some of y'all's work.

Our office just uses enscape/revit now. Our machines aren't anything to write home about, mostly dell precision's with 2080s. Will eventually move on to lumion when/if the economy stabilizes for us.

if you need AWS help, please let me know - username at hotmail